Slavutych – the purpose-built Soviet city which housed former Pripyat residents
Slavutych – the purpose-built Soviet city which housed former Pripyat residents
After the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown which shocked the world on April 26, 1986, the residents of the city of Pripyat were forced to immediate evacuation. This was the city closest to the radiation spilling reactors and soon turned into a ghost town, a contaminated zone where spoons and forks were forever left on the breakfast tables, meals never finished.
To resolve the pending rehousing problem, the Soviet government decided to build a new city for the Pripyat residents who were abruptly made to leave homes, stripped off all their possessions. Survivors of the nuclear power plant hazard were also invited to move in there too. Which is how the story of Slavutych begins, a city that formed just some 50 kilometers away from Chernobyl and as much close to the border with Belarus.
A neighborhood in Slavutych, photo credit
This city was also the last one built by the Soviet Union before it dissolved. The building effort was helped by architects from all corners of the union, therefore, besides Russians and Ukrainians, there were Estonians, Latvians, Armenians, and others on the team. They planned for a city that would accommodate approximately 25,000 peoples. Each architect was further encouraged to instill their ‘local color’ in designing the different neighborhoods. Therefore, this city was not homogenously built, according to Atlas Obscura.
Because Slavutych was to be relatively close to Chernobyl, this meant the soils around were still contaminated to some degree. Consuming berries and mushrooms that grew in the nearby forests were not allowed. In fact, the nuclear meltdown hocked four hundred times more radioactive material into the skies above the Ukranian and Belarusian SSRs than the atomic bomb which diminished Hiroshima at the end of World War Two, according to one source.
For the builders of the new city, this meant deploying a new layer of soil above the contaminated one, before proceeding with the urban development.
Urban development in the so-called communist paradise city, photo credit
After that, the entire design of the city was accorded to provide healthy space for living for all Chernobyl refugees, therefore the construction of numerous playgrounds for the children, sports centers, and cultural venues. The job was well done. Critics would compare Slavutych to a communist paradise city.
Despite Slavutych was distinguished as an architectural gem in a pool of charmless communist cities of the day, the city did not break its link with the disaster-affected Pripyat and Chernobyl, however. The Slavutych train station still brings workers to run their daily posts around Chernobyl. Back in the day, the number of workers counted 9,000; only as of more recently, it has shrunk to 3,000.
The Slavutych-Arena in Zaporizhia, Ukraine, photo credit
At least 8,000 of Slavutych residents were also children at the time of the 1986 nuclear meltdown. Many of them inherited jobs as guards or else around the exclusion zone of the reactor. The zone itself still counts as one of the world’s most contaminated places. Ironically, it is also one of Europe’s largest nature preserves which shelter species such as the bison, wolves, brown bears and the lynx.
There is also a memorial in Slavutych which honors the disaster’s victims, particularly those who died immediately after the event due to radiation-caused diseases.
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